Abstract: We study whether image preferences in isolation from strategic considerations, namely purely hedonic image concerns, can motivate prosocial behavior and whether this audience effect is mediated by the number of observers. Answers to related questions from the extant experimental literature are often mixed or influenced by multiple mechanisms evoked by the context at hand or design employed. We employ an experiment involving a dictator game with a charity receiver and a binary choice with unambiguous social valence. Choices are observed by an anonymous, passive, and external audience whose size varies across treatments. Our simple experimental design allows us to isolate purely hedonic image concerns about appearing altruistic from strategic considerations and other confounding features of alternative designs. We find that donations rise by 10.2 percentage points on average when audiences are present, with every observer increasing the probability of donating by an estimated 2.12 percentage points. We provide evidence that the size of the audience also matters.

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TBA

Abstract: In a series of online experiments, Rathje et al. (2023) found that financial incentives improved Americans’ accuracy in judging the truthfulness of political headlines and reduced their partisan bias in discerning true and false headlines. They also found that both financial and non-financial incentives increased belief in true news favorable to the opposing party (i.e., incongruent true news). We replicate the original authors’ main results computationally using their replication package, after correcting for minor issues. In a pre-registered replication of the fourth experiment in Rathje et al. (2023), testing both financial and non-financial incentives on a new sample, we find substantially smaller and non-significant effects for their main results. Our data do not provide reliable, conclusive evidence that incentives can meaningfully affect the perceived accuracy of incongruent true headlines, truth discernment, or partisan bias on a more recent sample. Non-financial incentives also fail to significantly improve the perceived accuracy of incongruent true headlines in our sample.

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